A intense debate lately spread widely on social media, following a user posed the question to women: which would you prefer be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and life encounters, highlighted divides between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to inform women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they merited for that choice. This at least enabled those females who had been hesitating about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Scenario
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted from Swedish author the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a clergyman (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, yet it is his defense of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (the young actor) – and his belief in societal fairness and equality that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Antagonists
Soon in cahoots against him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on firing a recently mangled laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a populace easily swayed for a few bottles of liquor provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing an acting turn of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension sown, the moment arrives to proceed with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, the character Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward embark to verify.
A Strange Creation
This Bear Drama is a somewhat odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that allows distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that animals can be controlled or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, where violence, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, as the struggles between justice and revenge, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the entire production fully coming to life.
Tonal Inconsistencies
Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments in which the clergyman’s skill to discover clues and discern the maid’s destiny becomes almost risible. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined Hercule Poirot the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to confirm that indeed, it was definitely coagulated blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his latest deduction and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The pastor is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so quickly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and audience tolerance are tested. In its finest moments, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the answer to that debated question: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
